Thursday, April 15, 2010

It's the year 2012 and a meteor is going to collide with Earth in about five hours, destroying everything and everyone.

A cynical older guy goes into a record store, where two younger men are listening to music, pretending nothing's going to happen. Turns out that they have talked themselves into the naive belief that a group of five imaginary heroes and the obscure song "Fish Story" (with a mysterious silent minute) by an even more obscure Japanese proto punk band are going to save the world.

Funnily enough, they are right. A handful of stories from the Japanese past that are connected through the song and a few other elements will in the end explain how and why. Before we can understand, we will witness a normal loser like you and me mustering his courage, a champion of justice, a sleepy and sad school girl, an end times cult with bad timing, the recording of "Fish Story" and more.

Fish Story is an utterly wonderful little film I really don't want to say too much about. With some films, there's the need to experience them for oneself without hearing too much clever talk (or bad puns) beforehand, a need to listen to them and find out if they are the sort of films that talk to you.

As a film about - and very much in love and hope and faith with - the strange, nearly invisible (like lipstick traces on a cigarette) influence of cultural ephemera, the obscure, the imperfect and the weird on people's lives and people's hearts, Fish Story does talk to me. These are the things this blog is very much about, after all. I'm even pretty sure it is what I believe in.